Candid

What it is / background

Candid came from something that bugs all of us: after you hang out with friends, the photos just vanish into everyone's separate camera rolls, and "send me the pics" basically never actually happens. So we built a web app where one person starts a session and everyone joins with a link or a QR code — no app to download, no account to make. Everyone's photos pool into one shared album live, and Candid quietly does the annoying cleanup for you: it catches near-duplicate burst shots and keeps only the sharpest one, groups photos by their vibe, and can even find every photo you're in with a face scan that runs right on your phone. Then everyone just downloads the cleaned-up set. We made it for vsHacks around the automation theme, using plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Supabase for the shared backend.

Challenges and successes

The tricky part was making the "automatic" stuff actually smart — figuring out how to fingerprint photos so we could spot duplicates taken on different phones, and score which shot was the sharpest, took a lot of trial and error. We also ran into some sneaky bugs, like one where clearing the file input mid-upload silently cut off half the photos, and we had to add a fallback so the app never just breaks when the backend isn't fully set up. But it was worth it: the first time we watched photos sync live across two phones, and saw a burst of near-identical shots collapse down to the single best one, was the moment it all clicked. Honestly the thing we're proudest of is that we get every part of it — we can open any file and explain exactly what it's doing.